ease it off
by kilewolf
Summary: It's not like he hates it or anything. But after everything, going back to middle school feels kind of weird.
It feels weird, being at school again, after everything.

These are the hallways and classrooms from his memories. Past, present, future. Nothing ever changes here. Takeshi alternates between finding it comforting, and finding it alienating. When they were in the future, these desks and chairs had been part of what they were fighting for, powerful symbols beating in their chests, drenched to the bone in nostalgia and homesick longing. They would have given anything, back then, to go back for just one day, to sit through just one class, to hear the good old teacher drone on and on (and to freeze that moment in time so that it never got _there_ ). But when they actually came back, stepping back into this world had been—surreal, to say the least.

Three days. He bet his old man had been worried about him.

It'd been sort of like watching a movie halfway, and then pausing it while the character on the screen had their mouth open, mid-sentence. Then something comes up, and you leave the house with the TV still on, and when you come back someone else turned it off, and you have better things to do. And you don't end up finishing the movie until one day six months later, when you turn on the TV, and start watching again. The exact same moment, except the character has already finished saying their sentence, and has moved on to the next. You know you didn't miss anything—just half a line, at most. But it sort of feels like you've missed everything. Six months crammed into that half-line. It's hard to follow the train of people's conversations, after that. You get what they're saying, but you also feel vaguely lost all the time; you assure yourself it's just your imagination.

It's sort of like that. Or maybe it isn't, and Takeshi's just weird.

There are places in school he doesn't go when he's alone, sometimes. It's only sometimes because at other times, he actually feels like being in those places, for weird, masochistic, contemplative reasons. This is why he shouldn't be allowed to introspect: it never leads to anything good. Well, to be fair, sometimes it's okay—he just sits on the roof by himself after lunch hour, and he thinks quietly about depressing things, and nothing bad comes out of it. Other times, though. But the roof isn't so bad. It's been a long time (even longer than it has been), and he and Tsuna and Gokudera eat lunch there often; there's been enough rooftop chase scenes and loud explosions and colorful bento boxes set here that it more than balances out one dull memory.

The locker room, though. Takeshi isn't sure how he feels about the locker room yet. It sure makes him feel something, all right. He just doesn't know what to call—that. And that, and that, and that. So he kind of just doesn't. Talk about it. It's a bad habit of his, he knows. But he didn't talk about the roof, either, in the days following. Not even to Tsuna, who has still never brought it up directly. Takeshi can forgive him for that (very easily), because. Well, he didn't want to talk about it, and Takeshi has never really given much actual weight to things you _should_ do. He lives in a world of existing particulars, not universal principles. If complications arise, Takeshi likes to deal with them by pretending he doesn't see them, because he figures that then the complications will eventually just get annoyed with him and go away. It works with Gokudera.

So then, neither of them mentioned it, and time passed. And then it'd been long enough that bringing it up would have been awkward. Contrary to popular opinion, Takeshi does care about things like that. When they relate to specific things. Takeshi's whole shtick is sticking to basic principles and not sweating the small stuff, having that kind of endearing simple-minded integrity that counteracts his complete inability to plan ahead. It sort of doesn't work if you go poking holes in his foundational blocks. And those have got to be made of _something_. (Okay, so some of those were actually secretly—not empty, but he'd kind of, uh, forgotten what was supposed to be in them, and then had done the psychological equivalent of throwing crumpled bits of stiff toilet paper in them to make it look like there was something in there. And then he'd just kind of pretended they were totally full, and built stuff on top of them. It's fine, really, because who examines the bases of their very worldview on a regular basis? It's totally fine, unless he has an existential crisis. Those don't happen _that_ often, even for Takeshi, okay.) So he avoids messing around with those. Personally, it's been working out great for him. I mean, he used to think that nobody really enjoyed having their entire worldview swept upside down, but that was before he met all those people who met Tsuna. (Personally, he can't relate. It'd felt more like Tsuna had expanded his world in one great blast of fresh air than anything.)

He still goes in the locker room, sometimes. It's kind of unavoidable, seeing as how he's still part of the baseball team, and they need to change their clothes. They actually replaced all the lockers, because all the old ones were covered in too much of his blood. So that's a thing. His blood is on a bunch of old lockers somewhere, probably sitting in a landfill, in bits and pieces. It's probably attracting flies right now, actually. Flies, buzzing and crowding around, attracted to the scent of _his_ blood. For a split second he gets the absurd notion that there's more of his blood smeared on those lockers lying around somewhere than there is flowing through his body. But that isn't true. Whatever magical dimensional bullshit Byakuran pulled to save his life, it had filled his veins with red again. Or were the veins the ones with the blue blood? He would have to ask Gokudera. But then Gokudera would probably ask why he was asking (an occasionally unfortunate side effect of them being actual friends now—no, he's kidding, he loves Gokudera), and Takeshi doesn't want to have to answer that, so. He supposes he won't ask Gokudera after all.

It doesn't really, _really_ matter. Not much in Takeshi's daily life does nowadays. Because hey. He's gone on a spiritual journey and discovered the truly important things in life. Your friends not dying, your dad not dying, the world not dying, not perpetuating an ancient curse that feeds on people's life force in order to sustain the fabric of reality. Or something. It sure put things into perspective. So Takeshi's cool. He can roll with it. He can roll with a lot of things. It's the small things that matter most, like they always say—and then the big things that truly, painfully matter. The medium-sized things in between can be more or less neglected, without serious consequences. Takeshi's not so good at purposeful neglect, because it makes him feel guilty, but he's very, very good at priorities. Neglect makes him think of decay, and thus failure; priorities are self-justifying. It's his favorite thing about them.

He hasn't gone to class in a few days. He's not sure if he's supposed to. No one has told him if he should or not. That shouldn't count for anything, but it does. He still shows up to school, though. He thinks maybe it's because he likes the school, likes the environment and the fact that he gets to see Tsuna and Gokudera and Sasagawa-senpai (and sometimes even Hibari, who can't seem to stay away for very long anymore—ha), but he doesn't really like the thought of being stuck in a classroom for… class. Something about it turns him off majorly, and he's more than learned to go along with his gut by now. He used to sleep in class half the time, anyway. It's no big deal. If Hibari hasn't shown up to bite him to death, it's not a real academic misdemeanour.

Some people in the hallways have spotted him. They all look very concerned on his behalf, which is? Nice? As far as they know, he sort of got cut in half a month ago. At school. (He wonders how people reacted to that. He doesn't actually know who first found his body. He'd had more pressing matters to worry about, upon waking up.) And now here he is, walking around like. Like someone who wasn't cut in half, he supposes. He does walk very well. Practically as well as he walked before the incident. In fact, even he can't tell the difference most of the time, unless he happens to be in a life-or-death battle where he's forced to exert every cell in his body in order to _not die_. Because that happens sometimes. Occasionally.

Byakuran is very good at what he does, though. Takeshi doesn't want to know what kind of world he got the knowledge to magically cure comas from. The idea of parallel worlds still sort of fucks him up, to be honest. He doesn't like the thought that there are maybe other worlds out there where none of this happened, or where so many more things have happened that it's like the future all over again. That maybe there's a world where he's just _Takeshi_ and he just plays baseball, and he never meets anyone he cares about. It's a scary thought, for so many reasons, and Takeshi is afraid that some of those might be wrong.

He's been fine, really. After the fight with the Vindice, after Talbot—he's actually been feeling pretty good. But everyone has off days, or days when they willfully decide to be sullen and to think gloomy thoughts while they reflect on everything that's ever happened in their lives, ever. God, that makes him sound so—unappreciative. (Oops. Bad word.) He isn't _really_ brooding—things are way worse when he's really brooding. And things are yet worse than he's worse than brooding, but he isn't going to go there. Today's a nice day. The weather's mild, the sun's out, and the skies are clear, which is a plus; he gets ridiculously introspective when it rains, not to mention somehow convinced that he understands irony. Today's a nice day. He just doesn't… know what to do with it, is all.

He's not sure what his goal is supposed to be right now. Should he be training to be stronger? He should always be training to be stronger. That's the default setting for all of them, he's pretty sure. But Tsuna has put him on a strict no-exertion diet, as advised by like every doctor in the world (Namimori and half the Vongola, same thing, that's as far as Takeshi's world extends right now; he feels a bit bad for Byakuran but not really because Takeshi had really not been able to appreciate the sheer scale of the man's plans, he dreams smaller than that), and that includes no training, and no sparring. Which is? Ok? Takeshi's not really sure how he feels about this either, whether he should protest or not. He sort of feels like he should, out of principle, but it's a half-hearted thought. It's not like he urgently needs to hone his skills again, or anything. It's not like he really needs to come up with _more_ stances (seriously, he has so many now). It's not like the uneasy feeling of being without his sword at school is great enough to cause him major discomfort. It's not like either option will make him feel really bad. It's just sort of, like, ok.

 _Whatever Tsuna wants, I guess._

He knows it isn't right. Healthy, whatever. The word "health" is basically a joke to him at this point. He doesn't really want to use it. (He remembers when he—when they all used to worry about him hurting his arm again.) He knows it isn't Good, but. He's tired, right now. He'll get over it eventually; he always does. But right now, he's too tired to really do anything about it. In any case, if anyone has proven to be reliable, it's Tsuna. Takeshi can trust Tsuna. Does trust him, actually, with like, everything. Tsuna just doesn't really know it because Tsuna's kind of funny like that sometimes. (That's a lie. It's not funny.) Takeshi has no qualms making him his secondary auto-pilot system when his own fails. At this point, any fears he might at some point have had of Tsuna suddenly just up and vanishing are gone. The idea of Tsuna letting him down is laughable, actually. The other way around, though, well. Haha.

Better not start thinking about that. He decides to go see the real Tsuna, not the Tsuna that haunts his doomed introspective thought sessions. Even if more often than not, because Takeshi is completely hopeless, most of what comes to mind is the image of his soft laugh, his big doe eyes, and his warm smile. Remembering it is kind of like imagining a verbal hug. The real Tsuna is always even better, though. So Takeshi goes off to look for him. Maybe if he's lucky he'll even manage to get a real hug out of him. Takeshi thinks that would probably make his day.

Tsuna isn't in his classroom where he and Takeshi are supposed to be. Which means that neither is Gokudera, naturally. Takeshi only pokes his head in for an instant, in order to verify their absence; the teacher doesn't notice him, but some of his classmates do. He darts back out before he has to really look at any of their faces. It's not that he doesn't like them anymore—it's that he had, at some point along the line, come to the realization that he had never really cared about them at all. Not that he doesn't think they're cool people. It's just that they're never going to _mean_ 'friend' the way Tsuna and the others do. They can't possibly. And, because Takeshi is Takeshi, it is also immediately obvious to him that they don't really care about him that much either. Which should sting, but. It doesn't. Takeshi isn't sure if it's a numb sort of doesn't-sting or if it's more of a "I have too few fucks left to give to spend any on anything extracurricular" kind of ambivalence. Or maybe Tsuna has crammed so many spoonfuls of good-for-you companionship into him that Takeshi is now full of friendship. That's a nice thought.

Anyway. He should try to find them while it's still technically school hours. He'll go check the roof.


End file.
